This article is a trailer for my Writing Horror workshop on Friday 13th of June.

Pathos is a feeling of pity or sadness – the stirring of tender, melancholy emotions.

We may not always associate these sentiments with horror, which is all about aversion, hostility and threat. 

But when ‘monsters’ have the quality of pathos - when they can make us feel for them, even pity them - their stories become particularly poignant and memorable.

Think of Frankenstein, King Kong, Carrie, The Fly, and The Substance.  The monsters in these films may be scary, but we empathise with them.  At times, perhaps more than we do with their victims.

And as our minds deal with the 'cognitive dissonance' of these seemingly irreconcilable emotional contradictions, we enter a deeper, more long-lasting state of unease than would result from a simple shock. 

The French horror film Eyes Without a Face (Georges Franju, 1960) creates pathos around an objectively monstrous character, and demonstrates how this can make for a haunting and memorable story.

It’s a paradox of a film: restrained and dreamlike, but with disturbing ideas which look forward to something as extreme as Pascal Augier’s Martyrs (2008), and much of its power comes from its balancing of conflicting emotions.

The Plot

An eminent cosmetic surgeon is developing advanced skin-grafting procedures with ‘rejuvenating’ effects, using animals for his experiments.

But when his daughter is facially disfigured in a road accident, he has the excuse he needs to try out his methods on human subjects.

He kidnaps young women and tries to graft their faces onto his daughter.  Each attempt fails, and each failure signals the death of the unwilling ‘donor’.

Faces and their expressions are central to the film, which can be read as a dark commentary on the notion that the value of women rests solely on their beauty. 

The Evil Doctor – Génessier

Dr. Génessier is probably one of the most depraved characters in cinema. 

As well as his murders and medical crimes, he commits many side transgressions which show a psychopathic disregard for human norms:

• To divert police attention, he deliberately misidentifies the body of Simone, one of the murdered girls, as his own daughter, Christiane (whom he has reported missing).
  
  
• He keeps Christiane prisoner in his mansion, making her wear a mask at all times (to prevent infection, or because he finds it unacceptable for her to exist in this ‘substandard’ state?).
  
  
• He has Simone’s body interred in his family vault, and presides over a twisted commemoration of 'Christiane’s death'.
  
  
• Afterwards, he angrily berates Christiane for breaking down when she finds an invitation to what appears to be her own funeral.
  
  
• He allows Christiane's grief-stricken fiancé to believe that she is dead​.
  
  
• He humiliates Simone's father, playing the part of the truly grieving parent and saying the other man is fortunate because he "still has some hope" (which Génessier knows to be a truly perverse lie).

But Génessier doesn’t fully fit the cliché of the crazed ‘mad scientist’. He's ice-cold, inscrutable, always in control. 

​He knows what he’s doing.

The Mutilated Daughter – Christiane

Génessier’s flesh-and-blood face is as impassive as a mask throughout the film.

But Christiane’s fragile features – which actually are a mask – somehow communicate a wide range of emotions.

Her passivity makes it hard to determine her attitude to her father's actions, but we project a range of feelings onto her.  We feel - or hope - that she can see his evil.

However, there's a chilling moment when she caresses the cheek of a girl who lies, unconscious, on his operating table. 

Does Christine crave her perfect face?  Or is she feeling sympathy for another of her father's prisoners?

The Corrupt Helper – Louise

The film begins with a woman driving to a riverside location, dragging a body from her car and dumping it in the water. 

The woman is Louise, one of Génessier’s previous patients.  He saved her from disfigurement and she repaid him by becoming his procuress, luring young women she meets on the streets of Paris to his mansion-clinic.

Louise is played by Alida Valli, best-known for playing Anna, Harry Lime’s girlfriend in The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949). 

Valli is known as one of 20th century cinema's great beauties, and the fact that she - of all people - is knowingly enticing innocent girls to disfigurement and death gives the story an extra level of cruelty and sadism. 

The Wary Victim – Edna

Louise overhears a young woman called Edna saying she needs a new place to live.  She befriends the girl, and offers to drive her to see a room she can rent. 

​Inevitably, Louise's destination is Génessier’s mansion.

At first, Edna half-trusts Louise.  But she begins to sense something false in her ingratiating manner.  Edna doesn’t want to be driven so far outside Paris.  She doesn't want the room Louise is offering.  She just wants to go home.  

We study her troubled expression, hoping she'll ask Louise to stop the car, get out, and go back.  But something overrides her survival instincts.

The episode proves that seeing a character half-suspecting the danger they're in, but ignoring their misgivings, can be more gruelling than watching one who is entirely oblivious of their predicament.  ​

​Edna’s tension mirrors our own.  But what she suspects, we know.   

The moment of pathos

Christiane finally rebels against Génessier's dominion.  She attacks Louise, stabbing her in the throat (where she wears a pearl choker to cover the scars caused by Génessier's operation) with a scalpel (the tool of his trade).

Louise's response to this is truly disturbing.  She doesn't become angry or try to fight Christine, as we might expect. 

Instead, her eyes fill with tears.  She sinks to the floor, dying, and simply says:

"Pourquoi?" ("Why?")

It's a fleeting moment with huge character significance.  Through it, we finally understand  Christine's enigmatic motives.

Louise is unquestionably a monster.  But she's less concerned with her fatal injury and imminent death than with the emotional wound of Christine turning on her. 

Louise seems to be saying:

“I degraded myself for you.  I made myself into something less than human.  But I did it out of love.  It was my way of caring.  If you couldn’t see that, it was all for nothing.  Now I'm dying, I know my life was meaningless.”

To sum up

Like a lot of good horror films, Eyes Without a Face has the bold simplicity of a fairytale. There are clear echoes of Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, The Babes in the Woods, and others. 

It's a story that both resolves and doesn’t quite resolve, taking us to a strange place, leaving us there, and percolating in our minds long after we watch it.

​Which is the mark of a good film of any kind. 

​All of 2024’s top 10 grossing movies were sequels, or stories with previously established characters.

​Three of them grossed over a billion dollars, with one (Despicable Me 4) close to that benchmark. In 2023, two movies grossed over a billion dollars (Barbie and the Super Mario Bros Movie, believe it or not). Oppenheimer was also close, at $975m or so). 

Clearly the movies aren’t dead.

So why are the studios and streamers laying people off left and right, and what's the outlook for stories that seem to be - gasp - original?

​There are reasons why the industry is on the ropes. 

There’s COVID of course, which helped streaming become an even more regular part of our viewing experience, while the recent actor/writer strikes stopped everything here in Hollywood, and things were very slow to get going again.

The recent fires that blasted across huge swathes of Los Angeles affected the industry; movie-related businesses were burned out, and many people above and below the line lost their homes. Lots of them will leave the state to start again somewhere else.

On an even more practical level, some regular shooting locations are now gone forever.
​
Then there are the worries about A.I. writing scripts, reading scripts, and essentially putting everyone out of a job, at least once they have enough data to replicate everything so accurately and effectively that audiences don’t realize nor care.  

​So why bother to write your screenplay and go through the process of entering a competition, or trying to attract a producer, or get funding of some kind?

And more than that, what chance has your speculative or “spec” script (i.e. one that hasn’t been commissioned and is usually by a new writer) got anyway?

As a glance online will tell you, many spec scripts have been made into movies, including Thelma & Louise, Good Will Hunting, American Beauty, The Long Kiss Goodnight and the recent Nike/Michael Jordan drama Air. 

​Spec scripts still sell, too.

Recent sales like Break, a drama about two pool hustlers, or Three Hitmen and a Baby (no need to guess what that’s about; a good title and memorable high concept idea are always crucial) may be familiar-sounding – especially in the latter case – but they still sold: there was something there. 

And why? Because the monster still, always, needs to be fed. 

Millions are watching and want content, and so it will be the best stories – and the best writers of those stories – that will win through, especially in terms of new or emerging talent (and even more experienced players), because producers and studios, now as ever, are looking for writers who can ideally write in any genre.

Being able to do this makes you more employable for longer.
​
For writers, arguably the most perfect time is when you’re writing and rewriting your script and it hasn’t been sent out anywhere yet. You are unlimited by budget, or time, or realities: you can write a $500 million space adventure, or a one-room two-hander. 

Whether it gets made or not is another matter – it probably won’t, as almost nothing does – but if you can show your knowledge and skills with plot, structure, dialogue, characters and the other crucial elements, then there is a chance you could have a career doing something you love.

That’s still worth trying for, no matter how bad things look today (and remember, a movie will take a year or two or more to get made, if it even gets that far, and by then things will be different again anyway).

​After all, the late and legendary screenwriter William Goldman, whose spec script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, summed up the movie business perfectly and accurately by saying something that still applies today:

“Nobody knows anything.”

About James Bartlett

James initially worked in UK, Ireland and EU developmental funding, providing project assessment for short and feature initiatives. 

Since moving to LA in 2004 he has worked for commercial studio, production and management companies, continuing to partner with UK and Irish agencies.

​He has read for scriptwriting competitions including the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, the PAGE International Screenwriting Awards, AFI, WGA and Sundance.

He has also assessed scripts for National Geographic Films, New Regency, the New Zealand Film Commission and private clients.

Alongside script reading and story editing, he is also a travel/lifestyle journalist and award-winning true crime author.

​When I taught my Writing Neo Noir workshop at the London Screenwriters’ Festival last year, I asked the audience what attracts them to the genre.

Almost immediately, someone said, “it’s got femmes fatales.”

Which is true. But by no means all Noirs include this character.

And what is a femme fatale, anyway? How do we write about them in 2025? And more to the point, why would we want to write about them? 

And what about hommes fatals, their male counterparts? Do they exist, and how do they operate in stories?

This article looks at the figure in detail, beginning with examples from Noir's classic era.

At the end I list a range of strategies for renewing the fatale figure, along with examples of films which point the way.

In Double Indemnity (1944), Phyllis Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff into killing her husband so she can collect his insurance. She’s shown to exert a tremendous erotic power over Walter which overrules any scruples which he – himself an insurance salesman – may have.

But like many femmes fatales in classic Noirs, Phyllis doesn’t try too hard to mask her devious and calculating nature. ​

Walter sees himself as a tough-minded careerist, but his blindness to Phyllis’s real character (plain enough to the audience) calls this into question.

Maybe there's some kind of will to destruction in Noir protagonists? And the harmful potential of characters like Phyllis only makes them more attractive?

The lack at the heart of characters like Walter often seems to go beyond any craving for sex, into a kind of existential need.

Their lives are meaningless, hopeless, going nowhere fast. They need something to save them. But they're not clear what that something is, or what salvation looks like. 

In Thief (1981), protagonist Frank opens up to prospective girlfriend Jessie:

“I have run out of time. I have lost it all. I can't work fast enough to catch up. I can't run fast enough to catch up.” 

The fatale figure seems to offer the last chance for a potential future. But they only serve as a short-cut to obliteration.

This suggests that a fatale figure can’t exert their influence without a susceptible subject. Their qualities need to key into an existing set of needs and desires, just as a drug can’t work without the correct set of neuroreceptors.

So when framing a fatale figure you are also designing the protagonist - and vice versa. Like all protagonists and antagonists, but maybe even more so, they are reflections of each others' strengths and weaknesses.  

Their intersecting obsessions drive the story forward:

1) The fatale figure's obsession with gaining their (usually materialistic) goals.

2) The victim's obsession with the fatale figure (and, through them, with their own often nebulous objectives).

If femmes fatales exist, surely there must also be hommes fatals?

We don’t talk about them so much. But they’ve been in Noir since the beginning.

Harry Lime in The Third Man is an object lesson in the toxic application of charm.

Selling tainted penicillin in post-war Vienna – a racket which involves a callous disregard for the deaths of innocent people – he invites his gullible ‘friend’ Holly Martins to the city to put a writerly gloss on the operation.

By the time Holly arrives, Lime is dead. Or so it seems. Holly begins to investigate, but he’s way out of his depth (a typical feature of Neo Noir protagonists) in the corrupt snake-pit of the city.

Lime’s fatal magnetism works equally well on men and women: Holly is as besotted with him as Anna, Lime’s Czech girlfriend, who practically deifies him. Even though he has sold her out to the Soviet authorities.

And it soon becomes clear that Holly’s admiration for Lime is out of all proportion to any regard that Lime has for him. 

• Shadow of a Doubt (1944). Uncle Charlie grooms his entire family into believing that he’s a charming golden boy, not an extreme misogynist and serial killer.
  ​
• Possessed (1947). Detached and scheming, David Sutton exploits Louise Howell's infatuation with him and steers her into a psychological breakdown as terrifying as anything in a David Lynch film.

The traditional femme fatale typically weaponises sexuality and gender dynamics to manipulate men.

The homme fatal employs charm, intelligence, or authority, but often relies less on overt sexuality, more on psychological dominance or trust.

But all this is up for grabs, and mustn't be seen as a template to follow religiously.

Here are some possible narrative strategies, along with examples of films that help point the way.

• Remove the sexual dimension. In Nightcrawler (2014), Lou Bloom manoeuvres his powerless employee into a lethal situation. But there’s no sexual motive. Just an insatiable drive for material success.
  
  
• An 'innocent' fatale figure. 14-year-old Catherine in The Third Secret (1964) doesn’t seem seductive or sinister. Her childlike directness, need for closure on her father’s death and apparent innocence key into the protagonist’s susceptibilities.
  
  
• The fatale figure is already close to the protagonist. In classic noirs we usually observe the first meeting of the protagonist and fatale figure. But in Croupier (1997), Jack is manipulated by someone he’s known all his life: his own father.

 

• An untrustworthy mentor. The fatale figure in Thief is provided by the avuncular crime boss Leo, who exploits Frank’s deep craving for a family, and his need for a father-figure after the loss of his older friend Okla.

 

• The fatale figure is the protagonist. Arguably, some dark identification process happens when we watch sociopathic protagonists in films like Nightcrawler and The Talented Mr Ripley play out our own repressed antisocial tendencies.
  
  
• A femme fatale vs an homme fatal. Gone Girl has elements of this, although Amy is able to go to far greater extremes than Nick. The uneasy ending leaves the final chapter of their deeply conflicted relationship to the viewer's imagination.
  ​ 
• Misdirection. Despite appearances, Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown is the story’s victim rather than any kind of femme fatale. The person who assigns Jake his initial quest is a woman posing as her, although he later begins to work for the real Evelyn.

And finally...

• Not even human. Eva, the female-adjacent robot in Ex Machina, fulfils all the femme fatale's narrative functions - enticing Caleb, the callow computer programmer protagonist, to ascribe human feelings and motives to a cryptic and unfathomable A.I. entity. 

By Ian Long

A top film editor recently told me that he routinely removes the dialogue from the first assemblies of feature films he's working on.

He does this to see where speech can be cut and the storytelling left solely to the images.

In effect, he converts the films he's editing into silent movies.

This made me ponder the other things writers and filmmakers can learn from the earlier days of cinema. 

Later in this article we'll see how one silent drama brilliantly uses images to create its First Act Turning Point - ideas which can definitely be applied to contemporary scripts.

But in the meantime . . . where should we look for inspiration?

​Ideally, writers are interested in all kinds of stories. A varied intake of films, plays, novels, short fiction and poetry (not forgetting real life) has always been their staple diet.

But a surprising number of would-be screenwriters have a problem with older films (which can mean 'ones released before 2000'), black and white films, and silent films. Films with subtitles can also pose a challenge.

​Which is a shame. Because as well as a truckload of cultural heritage and plenty of interest and entertainment, these writers are missing out on a treasure-house of cinematic know-how. 

​Why should we watch older films?

The genres we work in stretch way back into cinema history (and, in many cases, far beyond it). This is because stories are mostly about the human experience, which hasn’t changed radically over tens of thousands of years.

Myths and folktales still provide the basis of stories, but because the narratives of films have been configured into visual forms of a certain duration, usually by very clever and talented people, they merit special study.

Film history provides a range of models for tackling subjects, and a wealth of characters, plotlines and settings to draw on, many more pointed and radical than those of contemporary cinema.

Would we have seen the pitch-black satire of journalism in 'Nightcrawler' (2014), for instance, without its (even inkier) precursor 'Ace in the Hole' (1951)?

​What stops people from appreciating older films?

Many things have changed over cinema’s century-plus existence: fashions, customs, speech and vocabulary, acting styles, special effects, approaches to cinematography and technical processes.

​But it’s worth remembering that some of our current conventions will seem alien to future generations, who'll need to make an imaginative effort to get past them.

This effort brings its own rewards. As well as enjoying a story, we get the cognitive benefits of engaging with a reality that's somewhat different to our own.

The exercise can also spur us to ask ourselves which elements of contemporary film are redundant or cliched - and perhaps look for ways to sidestep them, in order to avoid our own work seeming stilted in the coming years.

​Silent films

Many people equate silent cinema with comedy and jerky, sped-up movements (a technical issue now being addressed; people didn’t really walk like that before 1930).

But silent cinema also produced some great dramas. 

And it forced filmmakers to become adept at communicating ideas and emotions visually – still a crucial tool in the screenwriter's box.

So let’s look at the micro-beats in the First Act Turning Point from Clarence Brown's 'Flesh and the Devil', to see what they can teach us.

​Flesh and the Devil (1926)

In pre-WWI Prussia, army officer Leo (John Gilbert) falls in love with Felicitas, a mysterious woman played by Greta Garbo.

The first act tells us a lot about Leo, but very little about Felicitas.

Without fully realising it, we see her through Leo’s smitten eyes: charming, witty, beautiful, but lacking a real context - something of a fantasy-woman.

Then, along with Leo, we make the shocking discovery that she’s married to a wealthy and vengeful Count, who immediately challenges Leo to a "duel of honour".

The duel and its immediate aftermath constitute the Turning Point of the film's First Act. 

In just two minutes of screen time, director Clarence Brown and cinematographer William H. Daniels convey a lot of information with great economy and maximum emotional impact.

'Flesh and the Devil' - First Act Turning Point - Beats
​
1. The duel scene has no establishing shot. We cut straight from Felicitas' boudoir, where the Count has discovered Leo, to the torso of a man whose face we never see. 

2. Two hands reach into frame, taking pistols from the man, who we now realise must be the referee of the duel.

3. The next shot gives us a sense of the location. But it's more like a diagram of a duel than a standard movie shot.

High-contrast lighting evokes early dawn. A symmetrical composition emphasises the formality of the occasion. 

The Count (on the left of the referee) and Leo (on his right) are recognisable only from their silhouettes, flanked by their seconds.

4. Leo's friend Ulrich tries to dissuade him from the duel, but Leo is resolute.

​5. The seconds withdraw from the firing area.

6. ​With the seconds out of sight, the two duellists walk away from the referee.

And in a surprising moment, they keep going until they are out of frame.

7. Only the referee is visible when he gives the signal and the duellists fire at each other from off-screen.

​​It's a very unusual way to stage a showdown. We don’t know if either man has been hit; we only see the puffs of smoke from their guns.

​9. The next shot gives us Felicitas’ face enclosed by a frame. She wears a dark hat.

10. A man’s hand comes into shot and pulls a veil from the hat, over her face. We realise that Felicitas is dressed in mourning, and is looking at herself in a mirror. 

​We deduce that her husband the Count must have been killed in the duel.

11. ​A wider shot shows Felicitas taking off the hat and veil. A smiling assistant shows her another set.

​12. Felicitas puts on the other hat and veil.

And as she does, she tries out a coquettish smile in the mirror.

What do we learn?

Leo's killing of the Count fully commits him to the story - and to Felicitas.

​Until now she has been an enigma, but her demeanour when trying on her mourning outfit tells us everything we need to know about her true character.

It’s all conveyed in a momentary expression, without a word of dialogue, and it gives us far more information about Felicitas than Leo has learned in over half an hour.

We now know that Leo has killed a man over a woman so shallow and vain that she sees her husband’s death as a fun opportunity to dress up.

It also sets up huge suspense; we are now projecting forwards in the story, wondering what will happen when Leo (if we presume he survives the duel) learns the truth about Felicitas. Will he also be subject to her lack of concern for human life?

And in conclusion . . .

No matter how hard we work on our descriptions and dialogue, we should rejoice if someone finds a way to replace a chunk of it with a glance or a gesture.

In the end, it will make us - the screenwriter - look good. Because . . .

"Show, don't tell" is the ultimate movie maxim. And the sequence outlined above is a great illustration of it. 

The narrative deliberately feeds us partial information (the faceless referee, the sketchy locale, the knowledge about who is killed in the duel, and just what is happening in the scene with Felicitas).

By doing this, it invites us to join up the dots ourselves, and achieves the ultimate goal of the filmmaker: to make the audience feel that it is taking part in the process of creating the story. 

“When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past.” - Mark Fisher

Deep Narrative Design
​
This article represents one small section of my DEEP NARRATIVE DESIGN workshop.

If you want to know more, or if you need help with a script, email me here.

Share your thoughts!

• Do you agree or disagree that we can/should learn from older films?
  
  
• Are you a fan of cinema from previous eras, and if so, what attracts you to it?
  
  
• Do you have any special recommendations? If so, tell us why you like them!
  
  
• Or do you have  some other thoughts?

Please let us know in the comments below!

Feedback is the lifeblood of all great writing.

Q: BUT HOW CAN WE TURN THESE ISSUES INTO FICTION?

A: Many of the things listed above share a perverse aspect, in which things morph into their opposite.

• The meteoric careers of dictators and firebrand politicians end in disaster.
  
  
• Supporters of populists end up with leaders who act against their interests.
  
  
• Sexual abusers are dicing with shame and exposure, maybe even willing it on.

This perverse streak is part of the genre description of Neo Noir, which you can explore in depth at our workshop on August 31.

Updating the tropes and conventions of classic Film Noir, the genre provides a tool-box of plots, characters and situations to deal creatively with our self-destructive tendencies.

Neo Noir protagonists often don’t really need antagonists – they do the job so well themselves.

​Rather than a friendly “hello”, the first utterance of the actor Errol Flynn on answering the phone was the clipped instruction “be brief.”

A Hollywood star with a host of bad habits, Flynn was a busy man. But we’re all time-poor these days, which may be why the debate over film duration kicked off by Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour Killers of the Flower Moon has had such traction.

Like people, some films need a lot of time to make a point - others, not so much.

The shortest-ever Oscar-nominated film, Adam Pesapane’s clever Fresh Guacamole (2012), lasts less than two minutes. Meanwhile, ​Gone with the Wind (1939) was four hours long and won eight Academy Awards.  

But when it comes to spec scripts (ones which haven’t been commissioned or solicited by producers), we advise writers to go for economy over length.

And here’s why.

​
1.  Think about the reader

The person who reads your script will be busy and stressed, whether they’re a well-known producer or an intern working through a pile of submissions. The reading process requires time, concentration, and emotional investment.

Readers typically check the length of a script before starting on it. If yours is well over 100 pages, they will have questions. If it's over 120, they may not read it at all.

Unfair, perhaps, but true. And this reaction will only be enhanced by such things as typos on the first page – or any page, in fact.

Making the reader's task manageable and enjoyable will immediately get them on your side. 

​2.  Shorter is cheaper

Film is a very expensive medium, and the longer a film lasts, the more it costs.

​Producers are painfully aware that every extra page of a script makes a film more expensive.

So challenge yourself to tell a great story in an economical way which gets the most out of its locations and performers and has a tight page count.

Doing this gives the reader several strong reasons to recommend your script. 

​3.  An advert for you

As well as a dramatic work, a script is effectively a proposal to set up a medium-sized business and an inventory of the elements needed to make it work.

If it goes to production, every word will be pored over by costume and set designers, location finders, illustrators, VFX specialists, composers, and everyone else required to bring it to life. So you need to give all these things a lot of thought.

Even if your script doesn’t make it to production, you can make it work as an advert for you and your abilities - a “calling card” for other writing opportunities.

And turning it in at a reasonable length is a big part of this.

Apart from its other merits, your script can show that you understand the medium you’re working in, demonstrate that you are practically-minded, and infer that you are likely to be a good colleague who is not prone to making crazed or unreasonable demands.
​
A script that does all this is a better character reference than anything in your CV.

​4.  Length belongs to auteurs

People like Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan and Lars von Trier seem free to make films that run well beyond standard length.

You may have ideas to rival theirs. But before you get to realise them, you’ll probably need to prove yourself first with leaner and meaner stories.

If you do plan to broaden your canvas later in your career, honing your craft on compact material is the best possible preparation (see notes on Stanley Kubrick, below).

And arguably, Tarantino, von Trier, Nolan and Kubrick could have benefited from a little judicious cutting at times . . .

​5.  Stories have a natural tendency to run out of steam

Scripts usually exhibit problems a long time before the 120-page mark.

It's really difficult to keep up the invention within a limited scope of action, and after a certain point many stories begin to repeat themselves or strain too hard for effect.

Certain genres are particularly prone to outstay their welcome.

Thrillers and Horror stories which push beyond 100 pages often struggle to maintain the tension and suspension of disbelief which keep viewers engaged.

And even the fizziest comedies can go flat if overly protracted.

​7.  Memorable longer films have found ways to overcome these problems

A big budget can take a story into new settings, using something other than pure narrative to maintain audience interest.

It’s worth analysing how this works in longer films that you like. Perhaps the action moves to some interesting new location, like an entirely different country; or a big set-piece like a pitched battle occurs.

These episodes may take on such weight that the film’s structure could be seen as falling into more than three acts.


​8.  And what’s wrong with that?

There’s no absolute rule that films should conform to three-act structure. But there are reasons why this form is so useful for storytelling.

As more units of action are added to a narrative, it can start to feel episodic. Which means that forward momentum is lost. The story becomes repetitive and implausible.

And, ultimately, boring.

​Great shorter films don't have to do this.
​
So, to sum up . . . for all these reasons . . .

​9.   . . . it's harder to make a great long film than a great 'normal-length' film

Actually, "greatness" is a matter of opinion, so we can't really verify if the percentage of great longer films is lower than the percentage of great normal-length films. 

But it probably is.

Obviously, there's nothing at all wrong with a great, long film. Quite the opposite. Total immersion in something original, creative and entertaining is a joy.

However, even hardcore cinephiles have their physical and psychological limits.

And it has to be considered that . . .

10.   . . . Watching a bad, long film is much worse than watching a bad, shorter film

It just is. 

​11.  “But I want to make a big statement!”

A fine ambition. But longer isn’t necessarily deeper. 

Many commercially and/or artistically successful movies clock in under 90 minutes.

Here are 16 inspiring examples.

1. In just 88 minutes, Akira Kuroswa’s Rashomon (1950) showcased four differing accounts of an event, giving its name to a narrative method - "the Rashomon Effect" - which calls truth and memory into question.
   
   
2. Persona (1966) by Ingrid Bergman redefined the cinematic portrayal of identity and deep psychology in its 83-minute span.
   
   
3. The influence of Luis Bunuel’s searing 85-minute Los Olvidados (1950) can still be seen in stories of crime and deprivation like Gomorrah (2008).
   
   
4. Stanley Kubrick is known for epic length, but built his early reputation with pithy, concise films. ​The Killing (1956) created a complex narrative and a host of memorable characters in just 85 minutes, giving heist movies a new template.
   
   
5. In Paths of Glory (1957), Kubrick took 88 minutes to anatomise the follies of war.
   
   
6. High Noon (1952) told a tale of a lawman betrayed by the community he supposedly protects in 85 minutes of real-time.
   
   
7. Good comedy and animation don’t outstay their welcome. Borat (2006) is 84 minutes long.
   
   
8. This Is Spinal Tap (1984), nominated by Time Out as the funniest film of all time, lasts 82 minutes.
   
   
9. The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) crams a love story, eleven songs and ground-breaking stop-motion techniques into just 76 minutes.
   
   
10. No one felt short-changed by the 81-minute runtime of Toy Story (1995).
    
    
11. Underlining how shorter durations work well for Horror, The Wicker Man (1973) casts its spell in only 87 minutes.
    
    
12. The Blair Witch Project (1999), whose income was 4,000 times its budget, lasts 81 minutes.
    
    
13. A similar runaway Horror success, Paranormal Activity (2007) is 86 minutes long.
    
    
14. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), one of the most effectively disturbing films ever made, clocks in at a mere 83 minutes.
    
    
15. The many critics who acclaimed Locke (2013) didn’t complain about its 85-minute duration.
    
    
16. Same with the well-reviewed Petite Maman (2021), which lasted 72 minutes.

​WE HAVE A BRILLIANT CONSULTANCY TEAM WAITING TO GIVE YOU FEEDBACK!

Again, we don’t say your script has to “be brief” - in Errol Flynn’s words.

But good, tight ​writing is something of a lost art. People write long-winded scripts not out of choice, but because they haven't honed the craft skills and discipline to do otherwise.

If your script is over-long, we’ll help you find the shorter, sweeter, probably much more saleable story hiding within.

If it’s too short, we’ll work with you to find the right material for expansion.

And if it’s a good length, we’ll make sure it’s polished to the highest level. 

YOU CAN READ MORE ABOUT OUR AFFORDABLE FEEDBACK SERVICES HERE

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"As a controlling force in human affairs, motivation is pretty well shagged out by now. It hasn’t got what it takes to motivate people any more.” 

–  Martin Amis, Money (1984)

The 'serial killer' has become a cliché of loose thinking and bad writing. Simply invoking the phrase can be seen as sufficient to create an all-purpose, off-the-peg bogeyman capable of shading stories with a pall of ersatz evil, for which little creative or psychological investment is required.

It’s understandable that many writers are reluctant to look beyond the words to explore the reality they describe. We all are. Because if it’s horror you want, there isn’t anything much worse than someone who views other human beings as disposable material for his personal gratification, and is prepared to order his entire life to this end.

The ‘serial killer’ exists on a lower moral plain than other murder-adjacent movie archetypes like the ‘bounty hunter,’ the ‘vigilante,’ the ‘gangster,’ even the ‘hitman.’ To say something meaningful about this kind of individual – merely to provide a credible portrait of one of them – requires a descent into the darkest recesses of the psyche.

The Behavioral Science Unit

In the late 1970s, the prime movers behind the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit were prepared to make this descent, and – in lightly fictionalised form – they provide the protagonists of David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter (2017-2019).

It was the BSU which actually coined the term ‘serial killer,’ providing a conceptual framework to help the group profile and track down the ‘new’ kind of murderer they’d identified – and, ideally, to prevent them from offending in the first place.

So what conclusions does Mindhunter draw about ‘serial killers’? And what hints does the series give us on how to approach them from a writing point of view?

Dirty, hazy yellow

In style and theme, Mindhunter is an elaboration of Fincher’s 2007 film Zodiac, which focused on the perpetrator of a sequence of murders over a period of years in the San Francisco Bay area (the Zodiac Killer was still active at the time in which Mindhunter is set, and his identity has never been satisfactorily established).

The series shares Zodiac’s predilection for visual fields of dirty, hazy yellow, its semi-abstract use of space, and its painstaking reconstructions of retro domestic and institutional environments – evocations so meticulous that Netflix cancelled the show’s third season because it was all just getting too expensive.

Mindhunter also harks back to Fincher’s early film Se7en (effectively his debut after the mis-step of the quickly-disowned Alien 3), the movie which put him on the cinephile map as a talent to be watched.

​But for all its state-of-the-art imagery and baroque twists, Se7en was complicit (along with the Hannibal franchise) in elevating the 'serial killer' to the status of evil genius whose intellect effortlessly dwarfs that of the cops on his trail.

Copycat killers

Se7en and Silence of the Lambs triggered a slue of cinematic copycats. Repeat murderers showed up all over the landscape of film and TV (where would Nordic Noir be without them?), each with a basket of strange obsessions, each killing according to some more or less implausible personal pattern. Untold numbers of further suspects linger in countless unproduced scripts.

But Fincher himself had sobered up considerably by the time of Zodiac. The film tracked the personal sacrifices made by a man who becomes obsessed with bringing the titular killer to justice. The barely conclusive nature of his quest is mirrored by a long, tortuous narrative that risked draining the life from its audience even as it anatomised a very real psychological situation.

​This air of gravity persists in Mindhunter, which sidesteps numerous genre tropes.

​In contrast with the lingered-over, guignol death tableaux of Se7en, the crimes are relayed to the audience either verbally, or via briefly-glimpsed crime-scene photos. We don’t get to see the gruesomeness. But we are well aware it’s there.

The Paranoid Thriller

Wilson’s words call to mind what’s now called the Paranoid Thriller subgenre. Around the time that Mindhunter is set, a cluster of outstanding films (Night Moves, Klute, Chinatown, The Conversation, The Parallax View and others) suggested that it was futile to try to understand criminal activity, political events, human motivations – perhaps reality itself.

Each film features a protagonist who tries, and fails, to get to the heart of a crucial investigation of some kind, with each (non) resolution overturning genre expectations in ways calculated to unnerve audiences (Zodiac could be seen as a late flowering of the subgenre).

Finding information

Holden’s next fortuitous meeting is with Debbie, a young woman with a contradictory nature. On the one hand she has strong ‘manic pixie dream girl’ markers, giving Holden capriciously mixed signals while introducing him to punk rock, bongs and cunnilingus.

​However, she’s also a graduate sociology student and clues him up on Emile Durkheim’s theory that “all forms of deviancy are simply a challenge to the normalised repressiveness of the state.”

​But Holden isn’t into top-down theory. He wants information straight from the horse’s mouth. So he’s excited when a contact tells him about Edmund Kemper, a man who’s recently turned himself in to the police, confessing to numerous killings. When he learns that Ed is more than happy to talk about himself, Holden just has to go and meet him. 

The horse and his mouth

Ed may be Mindhunter’s most memorable feature. A six-foot-nine slab of pallid flesh embodied by Cameron Britton in a disturbingly convincing manner (like all the killers we meet in the series), he is another bifurcated character.

The crimes he’s committed are wilfully, militantly, atrocious; but he’s able to explicate his psychology and actions in such detached, meticulous terms that he’s as much well-informed, if weirdly affectless, college lecturer as deranged slayer.

Over-excited, new to the craft of interviewing psychopaths, Holden injudiciously spills details of his relationship with Debbie to the impassive man-mountain, who’s more than capable of reversing the flow of inquiry to feel out the psychology of his interrogators. Nonetheless, Ed quickly becomes a touchstone for Holden’s nascent team.

For by now, Holden has united with FBI agent and gruff family man Bill Tench (a traditionalist, but intelligent and open to new ideas) and writer and academic Wendy Carr (cool, analytical, a corrective to Holden’s wayward leanings) to inaugurate the Behavioral Studies Unit in earnest.

​Wendy hopes that the knowledge gleaned from their extreme cases will apply to her own study of white collar, but no less psychopathic, criminals.

Initially repulsed by the idea of fraternising with the likes of Ed, Bill soon relents and joins Holden in further interviews, meanwhile struggling with the possibility that the wily narcissists they’re probing may well be manipulating them.

A new kind of killer?

Some surprises emerge from the interviews. The Son of Sam’s tales of demonic possession were probably concocted for the benefit of police, psychiatrists, and the general public. Manson may have been as much a follower as a leader: having cobbled together a litany of violent fantasies to entrance and subdue his ‘family’, Charlie had little recourse but to fall in line when they began to actually put them into practice.

But what of Wilson’s suggestion that some new kind of killer was brewed in the chaotic crucible of the American 1970s?

​Compulsive sexual murderers with grotesque résumés similar to those we see in the series had been brought to justice decades before the 1970s. Ed Gein and Albert Fish are just two examples.

But many more may never have been caught at all.

If a killer chose his targets astutely, it could have been much easier to get away with killings in the days before mass media, when large, newly-arrived transient populations, often lacking a common language, were dispersing across a vast territory, and authorities were unable or unwilling to join the dots.

And the fundamental causative factors for criminal psychopathology which the team uncovers are far from time-specific.

Backstories of neglect, abuse, rejection, ostracism for perceived ‘difference,’ sadistic parents, social deprivation, and time spent in institutions feature strongly in the early lives of the killers they profile. Sad, certainly, but unexceptional, and definitely not confined to the 1970s.

​
“Battle not with monsters”

As the series continues, however, it becomes plain that while the BSU agents are looking into the abyss, the abyss is staring squarely back at them.

Always rather introverted and humourless, Holden’s increasingly strident “ends justify the means” absolutism begins to alarm Bill and Wendy. And when the murder of an elderly woman whose investigation they’ve been reluctantly drawn into is followed by another, similar crime, his punching-the-air jubilation is truly jarring.

Yes, the case now fits their remit of repeated killings, but is this really something to celebrate?

The glacially competent Wendy marvels at one killer’s ability to “compartmentalise” his life, seemingly unaware of her repeated use of the same word to characterise her own choice of remaining a closeted Lesbian. Bill’s withdrawn adopted son Brian manifests traits similar to those of a neophyte psychopath, having participated in the killing of a baby by a group of other children.
​
On top of all this, all three team members experience breakdowns in their intimate lives – having already established that dysfunctional sexual relations are one key indicator of psychopathology (Holden frequently reiterates that serial killers are incapable of living normal lives, holding down jobs, maintaining meaningful relationships).

In conclusion: writing the ‘serial killer’

Is the series saying that Holden, Bill and Wendy are in fact psychopaths? Probably not.

But it suggests that some of the qualities which make up a severely antisocial personality are shared by many more people than we may want to think.

There’s no reason why the kinds of people we’ve been discussing shouldn’t appear in fiction. After all, they represent an extreme aspect of what it is to be human.

But remember you'll need to engage with some very disturbing material if you are going to do justice to the subject and say anything new or important about it.

SOME GUIDELINES FOR WRITING IN THIS AREA

So if you are thinking about a character, bear these guidelines in mind:

1.  Be sure that this is a topic you really want to delve into on a psychological and emotional level. 

2.  Sideline the phrase ‘serial killer,’ and other, similar 'thought-terminating clichés'; look behind the words and be sure you know exactly what they mean.

3.  Establish that you have something genuinely meaningful to say on the subject, and that you know how you’re going to say it.

4.  Do serious research into the phenomenon; otherwise, you’re at risk of recycling uninteresting, potentially damaging clichés.

5.  You are depicting a human being with a personal history – not an abstract ‘incarnation of evil’ or a ‘monster’, even if their behaviour makes them seem so.

6.  Bear in mind the most chilling and provocative line in the entire series.

It comes from Edmund Kemper, in the course of Holden and Bill’s last interview with him. And it relates, among other things, to Wendy’s preoccupation with high-level psychopaths:

“Seems to me,” he says, “everything you know about serial killers has been gleaned from the ones who’ve been caught.”


About Ian Long

​I am especially interested in Thrillers, Neo Noir, Horror and Science Fiction, and I teach workshops in these genres as well as ones in 'Deep Narrative Design' and 'Creating Fear in Films'.

A dark psychological thriller called 'Stargazer' that I have co-written with director Christian Neuman is being shot this autumn.

I'm currently finishing a 'supernatural drama' set in rural Italy, and working on a number of other stories. and mentoring a number of writers on a variety of interesting projects.

If you'd like to find out more about working with me, you can contact me here.

AND PLEASE LET ME KNOW ANY THOUGHTS YOU HAVE ON THIS BLOG IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!

AGREEMENT, DISAGREEMENT AND ALL OTHER REACTIONS GRATEFULLY ACCEPTED! 

USING CHAPTER HEADINGS IN FILMS​

By Ian Long

The iron rule “show, don’t tell” is instilled into screenwriters from day one. So why do some filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino, Jane Campion and Wes Anderson, for instance) risk pulling audiences out of their stories by breaking them up with chapter headings?

Surely that’s a novelist’s trick – something just for books?

​The answer is that used creatively and judiciously, chapters can add an enormous amount to films.

So let’s see what screenwriters should know about them.

Pulling it all together – Babe (Chris Noonan, 1995)

In October’s Sight and Sound, producer George Miller told what happened when he showed the first cut of Babe to his now-wife, film editor Margaret Sixel:

“She sat and watched it and went silent. And the first thing she said was, ‘You’re not going to release it like that, are you?’ I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘George, it has no narrative tension. It’s episodic.’ And she was right. She said, ‘What we should do is put in chapter headings to make a virtue of its episodic nature.’”

Margaret’s suggestion seemed to work, as the quaint tale of a piglet who wants to be a sheepdog went on to make $254.1 million on a $30 million budget, and still has an approval rating of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Making a virtue of a necessity

Making a feature out of something you can’t hide is a well-known design concept. Ideally, the foregrounded element takes on a new life, becoming a positive asset.

But chapters are much more than a way to rescue a film with structural problems. 

Time slowing down - ANIARA (Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, 2018)

The jaw-dropping Swedish science fiction film Aniara is set on a vast space shuttle taking people on a three-week voyage from a used-up Earth to a new home on Mars. But an accident sends the ship drifting helplessly, perhaps endlessly, into deep space.

The film is broken into chapters telling us how long the journey has lasted, and each chapter has its own subtitle.
​
The first chapter is titled “HOUR 1: ROUTINE VOYAGE.” 

The next is “WEEK 3: WITHOUT A MAP.”

Then, a sudden leap to “YEAR 3: THE YURG.”

After this, we cycle through “YEAR 4: THE CULTS,” “YEAR 5: THE CALCULATION,” and “YEAR 6: THE SPEAR.” 

Each new chapter comes as a shock as we empathise deeply with the people trapped on the ship, closely following some individual stories, and contemplate the physical and psychological impact of remorselessly passing time.

​Big jumps to “YEAR 10: THE JUBILEE” and "YEAR 24: The SARCOPHAGUS" painfully signal that the passengers will never reach their destination, and that we're watching the despair and denial of people faced with an impossible situation. 

But after this comes one of the most devastating uses of chapter design I've seen. The ship (now entirely devoid of life) comes into the orbit of a beautiful, Earth-like planet

The chapter heading reads:  "YEAR 5,981,407: LYRA CONSTELLATION."

In the few remaining moments before the film ends, we have to process the fact that the spaceship is now a relic of a long-vanished species. Almost certainly, no human beings remain anywhere in the Universe. 

After two hours of concentrating our attention on specific characters and social situations, the narrative has brushed them aside and revealed its true themes:

The absurdity of looking for "another Earth." The uniqueness and value of our own planet. The smallness of humanity in the face of space-time and the immensity of the Universe.

The film achieves its overwhelming effect by setting up a pattern and finally breaking it, exploding our understanding of the situation in a profound and moving way.

Time speeding up – THE SHINING (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Kubrick’s film tells the story of Jack Torrance, a would-be writer who takes a job as the off-season caretaker of The Overlook, a rambling, remote upscale hotel.

Its titles start modestly enough, describing story events without reference to time:

“THE INTERVIEW” and “CLOSING DAY.”

The next title reads: “A MONTH LATER”.

As the narrative speeds up, we move through various days of the week, but in a rather odd order: “TUESDAY”, “SATURDAY”, “WEDNESDAY,” “MONDAY”.

The last few titles denote times of day: “8AM,” and “4PM”.

In some ways Kubrick is aiming for the opposite effect to Aniara, but the sum total is similarly claustrophobic. We feel as if time is collapsing as we're hurled towards some inescapable but probably appalling denouement.

We may not register the jumbled, inconsistent nature of the titles consciously, but they have a subliminally deeply unsettling effect.

Many other elements of the film share this deliberately chaotic and irrational aspect (detailed in the excellent documentary Room 237), so the design of the titles greatly boosts the film's weird, off-centre feel.

A lingering question – CONTAGION (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

Soderbergh’s film presciently follows the course of a pandemic emanating from China. Along the way, a number of leading actors are infected with the virus and die quickly and horribly, upping both the story’s realism quotient and the audience’s fear-factor.

Teasingly, though, the film’s chaptering scheme starts with “DAY TWO” rather than the “DAY ONE” we might have expected.

It continues through DAYS 3 – 8, then moves to “DAY 12,” “DAY 14,” “DAY 18,” “DAY 21,” “DAY 26,” and “DAY 29.”

Then there is a leap to “DAY 131,” “DAY 133,” and “DAY 135.”

What is the emotional/psychological effect of all this?

The careful annotation of passing time heightens the sense that this is an account of real or potential events. It also demonstrates how quickly a disease can spread around a fully globalised world, something we now know all too well.

​By the end, though, most of the audience will probably have forgotten that they came into the story on “DAY 2.”

But when the film is almost over, we finally arrive at “DAY 1”.

A flashback sequence shows a bulldozer destroying an area of rainforest in China. A colony of bats is disturbed, one of which drops a piece of banana into a nearby farm, where a pig eats it.

The pig’s carcass is prepared in the kitchen of a Macau casino by a chef who leaves the kitchen without washing his hands to pose for a photo with a woman. And this is the person who, we now realise, brought the virus to the US.

The chaptering gives us a pattern which we may not realise has been incomplete throughout the story until the “DAY ONE” chapter heading brings this home.

Like Aniara, it's only with this final nugget of information that the story's full meaning becomes clear. 

More on Narrative Design

This article outlines just a few ways that chapters can be used. People are constantly finding new, creative ways to use them. Not all stories benefit from chaptering, though, so think carefully before using them.

Do you have thoughts on chaptering in cinema?

Maybe you can think of films that use chapters in other, interesting ways? Or perhaps you dislike chapters, and feel cinema would be better off without them?

Let us know your thoughts in the Comments!

Succession’s first episode begins with an elderly man stumbling out of bed in the middle of the night. “Where am I?” he mutters. “Where the fuck am I?”

​The light is so dim that we can hardly see the room he’s in, or anything in it. We can barely even see the man (“Where are we? A prison cell? A maze?” the script asks).

​The man is Logan Roy, owner of Waystar RoyCo, “the fifth largest global media and entertainment conglomerate in the world”. But we don’t know that yet. He could be any bewildered old man, stumbling in a fog of confusion, and we’re stumbling in the fog with him.

There’s a liquid patter, and we realise that the man is urinating. A light comes on, and we see that the floor he’s fouling is thickly carpeted. A woman in a nightgown appears behind him. “It’s okay, Logan,” she says. “It’s okay. We’re in the new place.”

Her manner suggests that she’s used to this kind of thing. She gently leads him away from the wet patch.

It’s powerful, disorientating story-telling, and suggests that the series will take a very particular approach to the craft of narrative.

Primed, I kept a lookout for further queasy moments - and outpourings of bodily fluids.

Sure enough, roughly ten minutes later, Greg Hirsch, Logan’s hapless, bumbling great-nephew, who’s working as a costumed mascot in one of the family’s theme parks, unwisely smokes a joint before donning his costume.

​He gets dizzy when a child unexpectedly begins to climbs on him, and is unable to take off his over-sized plastic cartoon head before being violently unwell.
​
Which brings forth the plaintive exclamation: “Eww! He’s puking out of his eyes!”

The opening scene forces us to lean in to the story, to try and make sense of what we’re seeing. It’s a challenge – and a statement of intent.

“If we’re going to show you something this intimate straight off the bat,” it seems to say, “you can see we won't flinch from any of this family’s deepest, darkest secrets. Wanna come along for the ride?”

After this, every painful, cringe-worthy exchange, every eruption of the human interior into the outside world, makes good on this promise, and reinforces it.

Logan’s youngest son Roman ejaculates on the window of his swanky high-rise office. His son-in-law Tom Wambsgans recounts how he has just ingested his own sperm from the mouth of a woman who’s fellated him. Logan’s other son Kendall bleeds from the nose after a lengthy cocaine binge and also defecates in his bed. Logan’s daughter, Shiv, very deliberately spits on Kendall’s notebook.

Logan himself continues to mutter darkly about his inability to control his bladder, to urinate in inappropriate places, and to suppress the urge to vomit with difficulty.

Succession’s creator Jesse Armstrong previously co-wrote Peep Show, a dark comedy which had more than its fair share of icky moments and often sailed close to ”gross-out” territory, so it’s obviously a bit of a personal signature. One American writer sees this mortification of characters as a specifically British brand of cynicism.

​But how does it refer to worldbuilding?

When you’re trying to create a globally popular long-form TV show or an open-world computer game, you need to think carefully about the world where your story takes place. Is it interesting? Is it new, fresh, original? Is it big enough to contain a story that can last for many seasons, or be played multiple times?

All stories need to create their own special worlds. It’s more obvious in fantasy-based genres like Science Fiction and Fantasy, and yes, there’s more scope – and probably more potential for things to go wrong – in these genres.

But worldbuilding is still there in seemingly ‘realistic’ forms of fiction, albeit in subtle and understated ways, and it's worth exploring exactly how this works.

In these kinds of stories, it’s all about emphasis - the things that storytellers decide to bring to the foreground, and the things they withhold.

It’s partly a genre thing

When writers are immersed in a genre, they may not think too much about its ‘rules’ – the fact that some things can happen, some things can’t happen, and some things can’t even exist in the world they’re creating.

​Perhaps they’ve internalised the rules so deeply that some psychological limiting effect kicks in which prevents transgression (although many stories might be more interesting if it didn’t - as we're seeing, Succession freely mixes a number of genres to produce its special narrative effects).

While simulating reality, stories actually give us carefully tailored versions of the world that hide at least as many things as they show, and which generally conform to our existing ideas of ‘what happens in this kind of story’.

It’s why real life can be so much stranger than fiction. Reality doesn’t need to respect genre rules, and will happily (or, in fact, obliviously) juxtapose the most incongruous things and events.

People tend not to be horribly murdered or suffer disfiguring accidents in rom coms, for instance. Protagonists rarely suffer from terminal or chronic illnesses in action-adventure yarns. Children are rarely seen in noir or neo noir movies (but tend to be very much in the foreground when it comes to horror).

There is plenty of violence in Succession, but none of it is physical - it all plays out verbally, emotionally, and in terms of this strange but marked focus on the characters' yucky and repellent side. This is clearly a conscious 'rule' governing the writing.

Horror is the genre most associated with ick, yuck, eww, and things that make us cringe, all of which come under the general heading of “the abject”. Succession isn't a horror story, but abject imagery is written into it at a deep level. 

By delving into the abject, horror wants to remind us of the things that we ignore, reject and cover up just to get through the day and fit into civilised society.

​The rot, refuse, fluids and effluents which are inseparable from our lives as embodied beings, but which we don’t want to think about, if we can help it, mainly because they remind us of our mortality. 

​So why does Succession have such a big yuck factor?

One author singles out humiliation as the show’s core emotion, and it's true that the threat of it (usually at Logan’s hands) marbles the Roy family’s luxurious life like veins of mould in a blue cheese.

Outbreaks of the abject tend to confer humiliation on those responsible, and some characters (Roman, Tom, Kendall), are so damaged that they seem to hunger for further degradation.

Even more than humiliation, though, this story is themed around, predicated on, obsessed with, one central issue.

And that is death.

Specifically, the death of Logan Roy, without which no ‘succession’, no handing over of power, is possible. 

The story's theme is written into that initial image of a bewildered old man in steep decline, out of control, regressing towards something worse than infancy.

​Logan Roy's physicality dominates the entire story-world of Succession. His health, or lack of it, sets its temperature and determines the lives of all the other characters. Everyone is minutely attentive to its nuances, and utterly dependent on its whims.  

Sometimes they want Logan to die, or disappear into senescence. Sometimes, when they see they aren't capable of replacing him, they need him to be strong (when a urinary tract infection briefly floors him during an important negotiation, they are completely thrown - even as they jeer at him for being "piss-mad").

But however quickly Logan Roy bounces back from his mini-stroke, however tough, and decisive he can still appear, however able he remains to taunt and wound his children, he is within touching distance of death, and moving closer to it all the time.
​
It's the issue that ties everything in the series together. All the lesser instances of loss of control echo and reflect the fact of death, and Jesse Armstrong has bravely and brilliantly built the world of Succession to reveal this reality in all its squeamish detail. ​

Lessons and takeaways

There are many worldbuilding lessons to be learned from Succession. But one of the most important, overturning the cliched advice to "write about what you know", is "how to write about what you DON'T know”.

Because who really knows what it’s like to be part of a family of billionaires which runs a global media conglomerate? Certainly not the team responsible for writing Succession.

Armstrong assembled a talented and diverse writers’ room for the project. They did an enormous amount of research, they discussed, elaborated and rejected ideas and plotlines, they used “wealth advisers” to fill them in on the mysterious ways of the super-wealthy – the 0.003%.

But mostly they relied on the writer’s most precious resources – empathy and imagination.

By Deola Folarin

1]  PAINTING WITH WORDS:

My first tip is as much for producers and script editors who are working with screenwriters who have dyslexia and other learning difficulties, as for the scriptwriters themselves. It is important to understand that dyslexic screenwriters think differently and that their approach to scriptwriting may be unusual. Yes, at times they don't catch onto what is easily grasped by most people, but they often think more than others in terms of visual and aural imagery. And cinema is a visual and aural art! And I believe others with dyslexia tend to think of screenwriting as painting with words and dialogue as cinematic poetry. Scriptwriting for writers with disabilities is not all 'Temple of Doom' and gloom: Spielberg was dyslexic! And it is believed that Stanley Kubrick had Asperger's Syndrome. Both are accomplished screenwriters as well as directors.

Because of my dyslexia, I never wanted to write. I came to writing as a frustrated director who wanted to get my own ideas down into a script that I could direct.

Now I really enjoy creating scripts, especially after I doing an M.A. in screenwriting. However, even today I have terrible problems with the 2 page-outlines that sell one's work. The logical progression, the correct grammar, and spelling demanded by these documents can be a minefield when you have a learning difficulty. 

However, they can and should reflect a dyslexic person's strengths. Use all those stunning visuals that you see and stories that you hear every day to help producers and funders quickly grasp the filmic life in your storylines, incidents, characters, visuals.


2]  THE STORY/PLOT NECKLACE

Here is where a dyslexic disadvantage becomes a firm plus. Dyslexic brains often make interesting connections and see the world differently as well as more visually. So search the internet, newspapers, and magazine for those diamonds in the rough. These are the beads you can put on that string of a plot. You might find a fantastic true story but you cannot get the rights or the first half is great but the second half is dull. That's, of course, the moment where creativity comes in - taking nuggets from life and stringing them together in creative ways. And dyslexics are often particularly creative - easily seeing original connections - for example, by way of unique angles e.g. point of view, sequences, etc. - that others find more difficult. Look at any great Spielberg or Kubrick film: JAWS, SCHINDLER'S LIST, FULL METAL JACKET, THE SHINING, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. 

And of course, study all the great examples of original story/plotlines whether from life, novels, biographies, or wherever; whoever created them, disabled or neurotypical. Since one of a dyslexic's strengths is combining things in a unique way, it is important to study films that do this. E.g. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN (I am not aware of a gay cowboy movie before this), JOHNNY MAD DOG, (essentially LORD OF THE FLIES but so originally set with boy soldiers in an African civil war zone). LIFE OF PI (You can't get much more unique than the story of a boy on a lifeboat in the ocean stuck with a tiger!) COP LAND( where a partially deaf sheriff defends his town from corrupt cops and the mafia). Or finally, MURDER BALL, (a feature documentary about disabled wheelchair basketball players).

Okay, you've thought of your unique, original, fascinating story but how do you tell it to others in two pages and a few rather formal paragraphs. I suggest taking a blank sheet of paper, drawing ten or so squares [ or circles] big enough for you to write one sentence in each. These are your beads. Then write one sentence in the first about the action/story that happens at the beginning of the film. Draw an arrow to the next box and continue to create the story necklace until you get to the end of your movie plot. I often start at the end. I like to know my climax and where I am going and then I go back to the beginning of the plot/story.

This diagram is a very simple way of having a visual sketch of your story in front of you.

If you do this on a large piece of paper then you can stick pictures that make comments on each story block next to it. This is hugely helpful when you are creating characters or setting the mood of the story/sequence.













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​3] THREE DIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS:

The best book I have read on creating characters, making them striking and three-dimensional is LINDA SEGER's CREATING UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTERS. Buy it and devour it. It is brilliant and helped me hugely.

There is nothing worse than an incredible story and pacey plot but with cardboard cut-outs for characters. Yes, it is difficult in a 2 pager not to have wooden characters since you don't have the visual poetry of dialogue in an outline but you can hint at the protagonist or antagonist's speech or unique mannerisms in your descriptions. Make your main characters unusual and stand out individually from the page. Your minor characters can be more stock. Remember we want to watch interesting people that hold our attention or ordinary people in interesting situations. No reader wants to read a 2 pager with dull characters. Strong characters will make your outline stand out. Shine!

Make a scrapbook that you can fill with interesting people whose stories fascinate you.

Create a list of questions that you would ask your character if you could speak to them. Become one of the actors in the story and interview yourself and other characters. This will really help you to make the characters more three-dimensional. 

Watch and study films with amazing characters in them: e.g. Melvin Udall in AS GOOD AS IT GETS, Mildred in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI, Hannibal Lector in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Russell Stevens in DEEP COVER, Brandon Treena in BOYS DON'T CRY, Alonzo in TRAINING DAY. Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER. Ask yourself how could you have treated these characters in a 2-pager.

Now you are ready to try your two-pager. Even on its two pages, don't forget to paint with your words and create aural images. Arrestingly!


4] GET YOUR WORK CHECKED:

This is an obvious point but probably even the most important for us dyslexics and those who have other learning difficulties. This will help you make sure your work is clear, well-written, and engaging. This is vital as a reader for a funder, a film company, or competition will have hundreds of 2-pagers to get through. You don't want your nuggets to get buried in bad punctuation and inept grammar that is distracting for a reader. You want the reader to keep focused and excited. 

Make sure you get your work checked by a script editor, tutor, or another writer with strong editing, grammar awareness, and correction skills.

If you have no access to anyone, do not despair there are proofreading services online, like grammarly.com or https://kindlepreneur.com/best-proofreading-service/ or https://www.writersservices.com/editorial-services/proof-reading-service/. There are also fonts which are more readable for dyslexic readers such as Dyslexie and Open Dyslexic.

Although Euroscript is not a proofreading service they have amazing script feedback services and courses at Euroscript. 

Have fun painting with words and creating cinematic poetry. Carpe Diem!